Additional specifications and requirements
In evaluating China's prospects for achieving superpower status, especially during this economic crisis, the first research question would take into consideration whether and to what degree the United States is in decline as a superpower, and if it is, then whether China is simply going to achieve superpower status by default. This is what happened to the British Empire after decades of economic decline and then bankruptcy as a result of the Second World War: the U.S. took its place as the leading world power. Certainly the U.S. position seems far shakier today than it did in the 1950s and 1960s or in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even the predominant economic model that it has been propounding worldwide since the 1980s, that of free trade and free markets is no longer sweeping all before it as it did after the Cold War.